Pereira, Susan Martins;
Barreto, Florisneide Rodrigues;
de Souza, Ramon Andrade;
de Souza Teles Santos, Carlos Antonio;
Pereira, Marcos;
da Paixão, Enny Santos;
de Jesus Lima, Carla Cristina Oliveira;
... Rodrigues, Laura Cunha; + view all
(2023)
Previous BCG vaccination is associated with less severe clinical progression of COVID-19.
BMC Medicine
, 21
, Article 145. 10.1186/s12916-023-02859-x.
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Abstract
Background: BCG vaccination, originally used to prevent tuberculosis, is known to “train” the immune system to improve defence against viral respiratory infections. We investigated whether a previous BCG vaccination is associated with less severe clinical progression of COVID-19./ Methods: A case-control study comparing the proportion with a BCG vaccine scar (indicating previous vaccination) in cases and controls presenting with COVID-19 to health units in Brazil. Cases were subjects with severe COVID-19 (O2 saturation < 90%, severe respiratory effort, severe pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, sepsis, and septic shock). Controls had COVID-19 not meeting the definition of “severe” above. Unconditional regression was used to estimate vaccine protection against clinical progression to severe disease, with strict control for age, comorbidity, sex, educational level, race/colour, and municipality. Internal matching and conditional regression were used for sensitivity analysis./ Results: BCG was associated with high protection against COVID-19 clinical progression, over 87% (95% CI 74–93%) in subjects aged 60 or less and 35% (95% CI − 44–71%) in older subjects./ Conclusions: This protection may be relevant for public health in settings where COVID-19 vaccine coverage is still low and may have implications for research to identify vaccine candidates for COVID-19 that are broadly protective against mortality from future variants. Further research into the immunomodulatory effects of BCG may inform COVID-19 therapeutic research./
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Previous BCG vaccination is associated with less severe clinical progression of COVID-19 |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1186/s12916-023-02859-x |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-02859-x |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
| Keywords: | BCG, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, COVID-19, Coronavirus disease 2019, SARS-CoV-2, Severity, Vaccination |
| UCL classification: | UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10168476 |
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